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Jack Ubaldi, 90, a Chef, Butcher, Author and Teacher

Jack Ubaldi, a restaurateur and butcher who won renown late in life as a cooking teacher and co-author of a book about meat, died on July 14 at his home in Queens. He was 90.

He had retired as a butcher and was teaching in the Culinary Arts Program at the New School in 1986 when the book, written with Elizabeth Crossman, came out. Its title is ''Jack Ubaldi's Meat Book: A Butcher's Guide to Buying, Cutting, and Cooking Meat,'' and it was a Book-of-the-Month Club/Cooking-and-Crafts Club main selection.

Publisher's Weekly called it ''a very readable and useful guide'' and said that many of its recipes ''require a good bit of preparation, but Ubaldi's commonsensical approach makes them manageable (on roast suckling pig: 'Be careful to measure your oven first before you buy the pig.').'' He also wrote for magazines.

Mr. Ubaldi taught butchering to professional students and home cooks at the New School, which gave him a Lifetime Achievement Award in 1993, and at Peter Kump's Cooking School, both in Manhattan. He was known for his habit of taking a bottle of wine to his classes, to be drunk with the meal that was cooked.

He was a familiar neighborhood figure in the Village, where he started his Florence Meat Market at 5 Jones Street in 1936. He ran it until 1975, except for time off for service in the Navy in World War II.

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He was also known for inventing, decades ago, his own cut of beef, which he named the Newport steak. It is still sold at the store, under its current management.

In 1996 The New Yorker praised what it called the store's ''marbled, tasty, and inexpensive Newport steaks.'' The actual anatomical point of origin of the Newport steak is a well-kept secret.

Mr. Ubaldi was still spending time in the store in 1976, and many a Greenwich Villager with a gourmet-cook reputation to uphold started dinner plans by conferring with him, as did several restaurateurs.

Mr. Ubaldi was born in Italy and was brought to America when he was 7. He grew up in Greenwich Village and began working in his father's butcher's shop at an early age.

He is survived by his wife, Mary; two sons, Richard, of Wayne, N.J., and Augustine, of Cleveland; a daughter, Joan Costello of Scotch Plains, N.J.; a sister, Mary Ubaldi of Neptune City, N.J., and 10 grandchildren.